Serb 'iron lady' admits war crimes

By Ian Black in The HagueDecember 18 2002

Biljana Plavsic, the former Bosnian Serb president, confessed to crimes against humanity on Monday as the Hague tribunal pondered how to punish the most senior ex-Yugoslav leader to admit wartime atrocities.

Plavsic, 72, remained composed after her lawyers submitted papers acknowledging she had "publicly rationalised and justified the ethnic cleansing of non-Serbs".

But she appeared to shift uncomfortably in the dock as Elie Wiesel, the Nobel prize-winning author and Holocaust survivor, called on the United Nations court to ensure that the memory of hundreds of thousands of victims was preserved.

"The act of bringing to light the reality of crimes committed is as important as bringing their perpetrators to justice," the former Auschwitz inmate urged the judges after they heard of mass killings, rape and ethnic cleansing when the defendant was a member of the Bosnian Serb leadership.

"How could she remain human in the face of such a betrayal of humanity?" Professor Wiesel asked in live video testimony, describing Plavsic as a gifted intellectual. "How did she reconcile that with her education, culture, conscience?"");document.write("

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Plavsic, a former biology professor, is the only woman among more than 100 people indicted for war crimes in the former Yugoslavia.

"Mrs Plavsic embraced and supported the objective of ethnic separation by force and contributed to achieving it," said the document admitting her role in killings, expulsions and cruelty inflicted by Bosnian Serbs on non-Serbs in 1992.

Once dubbed the "Iron Lady" for her steely leadership of Bosnia's Serbs in the Balkan country's 1992-95 ethnic war, Plavsic was deputy to Radovan Karadzic, one of the tribunal's most wanted men. She later took over from him as president.

"It is of enormous significance that Mrs Plavsic accepts before this chamber that horrendous crimes were committed in Bosnia and Herzegovina, and that she acknowledges her own individual criminal responsibility for them," the UN chief prosecutor, Carla Del Ponte, told the tribunal.

"Many of those who survived will bear the scars for the rest of their lives. There is nothing in the nature of a plea of guilty which in any way alters the seriousness of the crimes themselves."

But, Plavsic said she did not participate with former Yugoslav president Slobodan Milosevic in planning the ethnic cleansing and played a lesser role than Karadzic in its execution.

The tribunal was yesterday due to hear evidence from Madeleine Albright, the former US secretary of state, who negotiated with Plavsic to secure the Dayton peace accords that ended Bosnia's 3 year war in 1995.

Witnesses are being called by the prosecution and the defence before the three-man bench passes sentence.

"It is a high stakes challenge," said Richard Dicker, monitoring the case for Human Rights Watch. "With someone of this seniority pleading guilty to crimes of this gravity the court cannot impose too light a sentence, but it also needs to take into account her co-operation and remorse."

Plavsic, known as a Serb hardliner, insists she will not give evidence against Milosevic, but legal sources said she could still play a vital role helping to assemble evidence against him.

Last October she changed her plea from innocent on eight counts, including genocide, to guilty of one count of persecution, a crime against humanity that carries a sentence of up to life. The prosecution dropped the other charges.